Delete empty records from linked spreadsheet (2000)

My DB includes a table that's a linked Excel spreadsheet. Over time, we build up many empty records in this linked table. If I open the table itself in Access, those empty records appear at the top--perhaps 20 or more when I looked this morning. Those empty records don't seem to cause any problem, but I tried to delete them anyway. I selected the whole lot of them--they were contiguous--then clicked on the "delete record" icon on the toolbar. That's when I got an error message telling me that deleting records "is not supported in this ISAM."

First of all, I have no idea what an ISAM is, and, while I've found references to that acronym in my library of books, I haven't found anything to explain what an ISAM is. But more to the point, isn't there some way to delete those records? By the way, yes, I did open the source spreadsheet in Excel, but there I could not find any empty records.

So my questions are as follows: Should I be concerned about those empty records? If I should delete them, how do I delete them? And finally, what's an ISAM? Thanks!

Re: Delete empty records from linked spreadsheet (2000)

You can't delete them from Access, is what it boils down to, because the logic that supports the link to Excel doesn't allow you to do that. Open the Excel spreadsheet and use the menus to select the named range. I suspect you'll find that it includes blank rows and that is what you're seeing in Access. Try chaning the range to only include the populated rows and see if that cures your problem in Access.